Well, the problem with the fall of the Qing Dynasty in the revolution in 1911 is that it doesn’t mark a new start. It marks the collapse of the old regime, but that’s not the real beginning of the new regime. I mean the great problem that China faced from the mid-19th century, if not in some respect rather earlier than that is what was its response to European modernity, European industrialization, European military powers. China found it very very difficult to come to terms with this. It was grudging, it was limited, it was spasmodic.
---Martin Jacques
Senior Fellow, Department of Politics and International Studies; Well-known Author, Cambridge University
Well, the Chinese communist party is unique in a sense that it had almost thirty years of revolutionary experience during the time from 1921 until 1949. That gave the party a very unique experience in struggle at the same time also state building before the People’s Republic of China was founded. So that experience form a kind of the unique repertoire for them to later draw their experience from.
---NGEOW Chow Bing
Deputy Director, Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, Malaysia
Why did it win the civil war? I mean it because Kuomintang was divided, was very corrupt and played a sort of often rather ambiguous role. And Mao, you know, mobilized the peasantry and fought very successful campaign largely against the Japanese and so on and so. Mao emerged as the new force which, you know, the Chinese ran it around. I mean, you know, that’s he won the civil war and Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war. And that was, I think it was because the CPC offered a new prospect, a new, you know, something, a fundamental break with the past. So I think that’s what the Chinese wanted, a break with the past, a new possibility.
---Martin Jacques
Senior Fellow, Department of Politics and International Studies; Well-known Author, Cambridge University
I believe that every country, the people of evey country, should have the right to choose their own path. The CPC is successful in the way that it has managed to respond positively to historical task.
It is a party with an immense history. It is a party that has influenced millions of progressive people around the planet with its struggle, with its ideology, with its practices, with its experimentation, with its history.
---Loannis Bournous
Member of the Political Bureau and International Secretary of Syriza, Greece